“It doesn’t always take you where you need to go,” he explained to the wistful kids. “And the last thing we need is to be taken entirely out of the city reaches and have to find our way back.”

They wandered down a marbled set of stairs that led up to a rooftop tea shop where Ahmad had absently drawn in small biscuits and abandoned trays of tea on one sketch. It was bigger than he had even imagined though, with an airy balcony holding tables and chairs, and a buffet that held raisin-speckled rice, tender chicken, and individually potted rice puddings. “It just melts in your mouth,” mumbled Winnie happily as she sampled the sweets. “This place is better than Disney World.”

Ahmad, though, wasn’t so sure.

In every store, everyone smiled and had repetitive conversations, pointing at items they apparently had no intention of buying. They lifted empty pots experimentally in their hands and accepted boxes of mithai, and then returned to their previous positions without protest or question.

“No one seems to have a proper home here,” Winnie pointed out.

“Or a proper life,” Ahmad added, watching as a woman adjusted her scarf for the fifth time in a row.

People drifted into doorways and leaned against the wood grain, looking lost and never venturing inside. They pressed their hands up against the beautiful glass windows, but the shopkeepers looked over their heads in Winnie and Ahmad’s direction, their smiles desperate and as sickly sweet as their wares—apparently not aware of their would-be customers’ plight, or unable to help even if they were.

“The code doesn’t allow for life,” T.T. said bitterly. “The MasterMind apparently found it excessive to develop living quarters for creations that are more or less pixels.”

“Even if they’re programmed, it’s so awful!” Ahmad protested. “They look so real, and they look so sad.”

He thought of Madame Nasirah, of the desperate hope in her eyes.

As beautiful as Paheli looked, it seemed as though it was just as miserable for its inhabitants as it was for him and Winnie. Determination flowed through him. “We have to win this game. We have to change things.”

T.T. seemed distracted from the conversation, though, his nose twitching as he examined the buildings.

“There’s a lot here I don’t recognize, thanks to the last game and the destruction Paheli took from that,” T.T. explained. “I don’t like to dwell on how the Architect might have achieved it, but he used the MasterMind’s ability to code in order to have bodies for souls to be harnessed to.”

“So the MasterMind, what’s her story?” Vijai Bhai asked, rubbing his chin curiously.